Maria Sumner

Maria Sumner

Research Scientist at Ozlo, Inc.

Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics with minors in Spanish and Linguistics in 2010.MA in Linguistics from the University of Iowa in 2015
MS in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington in 2016

I originally decided to become a math major because I loved the subject. I enjoyed the problem solving and the logic and the patterns that came with math. It was later that I began to see how applicable my degree would be in solving problems in different domains.

Current position:

Right now I work as a Research Scientist in Natural Language Processing at a small startup in Seattle. My team at Ozlo is building an artificially intelligent digital assistant. There are two large components to that. One is collecting large amounts of data to understand and model the world around us. The other part, where I work, is using language to connect people to information. More specifically, my job is to automatically extract meaning and intent from human language, essentially teaching a machine to understand English.

How I use math in my job:

I use math every day. This ranges from understanding machine learning algorithms, designing and implementing evaluation metrics to assess the performance of our system, and coming up with creative ways to combine the patterns of human language with large amounts data.

Advice for students:

If you don’t know what you want to do yet, keep your mind open to wide ways in which math can be applied. When I was in school, I didn’t know that “computational linguist” was a profession, but it’s been an amazing way to combine math with my passion for languages.